While I can appreciate that understanding the subtleties of intellectual property law is challenging, getting the basics right isn't that hard.

If I produce "work" it is mine. I hold the copyright to it unless I publish it under some form of license that allows sharing - that could be a CC license or a simple "go ahead and (ab)use this content".

There is no issue with "citing" works or re-using some types of content.

However there's a massive difference between citation and plagiarism / copyright infringement. So if you wanted to "quote" an article you'd probably be ok, but if you wanted to republish an article in its entirety then you can't.

(And yes I'm over simplifying some of this, but most of it is common sense - or so I'd like to think!)

Over the past few weeks I've seen several instances of blatant copyright infringement and plagiarism by an Irish owned entity that operates in the online marketing / SEO space. So I've called them out on it.

Last night I called them out on it again and they responded. Their response is incredible:

I've removed the names apart from my own ..

There's so much wrong with this, but what really worries and concerns me is that these people are selling their services to small businesses who will not only give them their money, but also their trust. What kind of advice are they likely to give businesses if they don't even understand that ripping off other people's content blatantly is wrong?

I've been blogging on and off about my experiences and progress with dieting over on my diet blog.

One of the things that I've also been doing is sharing recipes for the various things I've been eating.

In order to display them "sanely" I opted for a WordPress plugin called "Easy Recipe" mainly for the display. I wasn't as concerned with the rich snippets and microformat stuff that it also can handle I just wanted recipes to show up clearly.

The tool is also handy to check if your site is setup with the "author" attribute for your posts, which you can do via Yoast's SEO plugin

Of course my dieting blog isn't all about recipes and doesn't get that much traffic anyway, but it's still nice to see how using a simple plugin can help with Google and other search engine's understanding what the content is about.

But it's only when you have a reasonable amount of data that you can really see how much impact this kind of issue actually can have on a site's traffic.

Here's what a longer period looks like:

Unfortunately other sites that I run have had issues over the last few months. Some were defaced, others had nasty junk inserted - the list goes on and on.

The key lesson to be learnt from all this is to keep a close eye on your Google Analytics (or whatever you are using)

If you see a dip in traffic overnight it might be caused by Google changing their search algorithms, but it could just as easily be due to something hijacking your traffic or inserting some junk into your site's code.

If you're using WordPress make sure to remove any themes or plugins that you aren't using. If they're not installed they can't be compromised.

Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools and make sure all your sites are registered there (I discovered that one of mine wasn't which made removing it from their "bad" list that bit harder)

Keep your WordPress (and other CMS) software installs up to date. Make sure that the themes you are using are up to date as well - a lot of them won't "tell you" when an update has been released, so you'll need to check manually.

A post on Mashable earlier this evening revealed the launch of a new search engine - Blekko.

I've no idea how well Blekko will do, but its method of displaying results is quite novel:

But forget the display of the results for a moment. Let's have a quick look at how you search.

In Google and most other search engines you simply shove in a keyword (or two) and hit enter.If you're a more advanced user you might play around with various operators to refine your results or add certain keywords to the query to tune it more finely.

With Blekko this concept is pushed to the front.

So if you wanted to do a search on say "linux" but only wanted to get back results from blogs you can use what they're calling a "slashtag", so your search query would be:

linux /blogs

Which is quite an elegant way of doing it. Of course there's a lot more to it than simply choosing the type of source. You can also use the slashtag to narrow your query.

It'll even suggest relevant ones for you:

You can read more about how to use the tags on the help pages of the site.

Since I run several sites I was curious to see how long the search engine had been indexing them. A quick scan of my raw logs shows that they've been actively crawling since at least May 2009:38.108.180.46 - - [27/May/2009:09:25:32 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ScoutJet; +http://www.scoutjet.com/)"

Not only do they give you the UserAgent, but they also give you the IP ranges that it comes from, which is vaguely useful if it misbehaves. Though I can't imagine that it will based on its previous activity. (Unlike VoilaBot!)

So what about the search results display?

If you look at the screenshot above you'll notice that each result is accompanied by a number of links. This is where it gets really fascinating if you're doing SEO. You can get a LOT of information about both your own sites and those of your competitors. While this information is incredibly powerful I can also see some potential for abuse. Of course if all this information is available to everyone then it is a level playing field so to speak ..

I'll be playing around with Blekko more in the future, as it definitely has an interesting angle on search.

I suspect the tech blogs will be talking a lot about it in the coming days...

Bing is the "new kid" when it comes to search engines. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't used it much, partially because I'm happy enough with Google and partially because Bing keeps getting confused about my location. (Some of the time it think I'm in the UK, other times it knows I'm in Ireland)

In any case Bing (Microsoft) have done some kind of deal with Twitter to offer more of a "realtime" search experience.

So a search for "ireland" will give you the latest "tweets" (messages posted on Twitter) followed by the most recent links associated with the keyword. So if you post a link to something cool on Twitter it should be picked up almost instantly and "ranked" against the rest of the community.

Danny Sullivan has posted in more detail over on SearchEngineLand. Hopefully Bing / Twitter won't be swamped by the spammy junk that can get sent onto Twitter by automated scripts...

Paul from Blackdog was chatting to me earlier today about Jobberbase, so I naturally asked him if he'd managed to hack around its rather annoying "200 status" issue on "pages not found" ie. ones that should return a HTTP response of "404".

I use Firefox both in work and at home, so I'm used to using it on both OSX and Linux (Ubuntu). Since so much of what I do is either centred around email or web based systems, my usage of my browser and a few other tools, is quite important to me. Things that make my life that little bit easier are always welcome.

So which addons do I currently have installed:

Google toolbar - shows a site's pagerank and gives you access to a few other handy little tools

Zemanta - a handy tool for bloggers which allows you to easily access images and links based on your post's content. You can also use it to easily link to products on Amazon

As regulars readers probably know, I run several websites apart from my day job (I really should put "day" in inverted commas, as it's never really been 9 to 5), including IWF, which is a discussion forum for Irish internet professionals.

(Last time I checked there weren't any laws against linking to websites, but maybe I was mistaken... I'm just not so sure anymore.)

Maybe I don't know anything about how the internet works, or anything about internet marketing or SEO, but I heard this rumour, now it was just a rumour, that links to websites were quite important. Maybe I just misheard it.

In any case I received an email earlier this evening from the owner of a website that someone had linked to demanding that the link be removed as it was against their linking policy and breached their copyright terms (I'm not linking to them directly, as that would be against their rules)

Am I alone in thinking that this is decidedly odd for a company that sells online marketing and SEO services?

UPDATE: The link I provided earlier was redirected to another person's website, so I have removed it.